Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self

The Design of the Mechanics; or, Sentiments Replicated in Clockwork

The artisan environments in Switzerland and the Rhineland that produced the two women automata were at the peak of their productivity in the 1770s and 1780s and thus nurtured the creation of the innovative and complex clockwork systems that enabled the automata to perform their nuanced musical and gestural programs. The mechanics inside the two automata move the figures’ arms, heads, and torsos and coordinate the individual motions into elaborate choreographies. Both automata’s bodily motions go well beyond the hand, arm, and finger movements necessary to produce the music. The automata also move their eyes, heads, and—in the case of the harpsichord player—torso to watch their hands’ motions on the instrument, to nod, to breathe, or to bow. Father and son Jaquet-Droz, and Roentgen together with Kinzing, built mechanisms that were significantly more complex than would have been necessary for “mere” music-playing androids.

Musicians’ bodily motions had a larger significance at the time, because they were intended in eighteenth-century music-making to communicate affects and sentiments from the musician to the audience during a recital. Such attempts to cultivate and share affects in social relationships were part of further-reaching ambitions in the “sentimental” age in Enlightenment Europe: political and cultural vanguards sought to establish a new type of social order—civil society—to replace the traditional estate society. Sentimental sociability was a key element in the conception and creation of this new social order, and it was practiced in such diverse settings as music-making, the reading and writing of literature, friendship, travel, letter-writing, scientific inquiry, child-rearing, and theorizing about marriage.

Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Roentgen and Kinzing deliberately designed their automata to conduct specific, ambitious, and elegant performances. They did everything that was mechanically necessary to accomplish this. If they had wanted merely a harpsichord-playing or dulcimer-playing android, they could have left out many of the mechanics contained in their women automata. Instead, they invested additional resources to design motions that captured spectators’ attention, motions that carried significant and widely known social and political meaning during the transformations of Enlightenment Europe. In chapters 2 and 3 I discussed how these efforts paid off: texts in the eighteenth century mentioned the automata’s full range of bodily motions. That is, the motions were “visible” in the texts, but also in each automaton’s mechanics, as this chapter will demonstrate.

Eighteenth-century artisans tended not to leave behind large numbers of written documents, but their material objects themselves serve as important sources. I investigate the two automata’s mechanics in this chapter in two ways. First, I analyze their clockworks to uncover correspondences between individual mechanical modules and the effects they bring about in the moving android. This analysis also gives insight into other parts of the automata’s history, such as the exceptional skill that went into designing and building them, key similarities and differences between the two, choices that the artisans made as to where to devote most of their technical skill and effort, conflicts between artistic and mechanical principles that the artisans solved, and social and economic functions that the automata served in their makers’ lives. Second, I explore the automata’s mechanical performance as a cultural scenario in its own right, with its own history in the eighteenth century. I examine this scenario’s connotations and valences in three contexts: I look at music-making women in the eighteenth century, then at the role of sentiments in music, and finally at the general social and political relevance of sentiments. The question of keyboard-playing women who move their bodies was, after all, a question of moral philosophy, aesthetics, and (marriage) politics in the eighteenth century.

The Automata’s Mechanics

The Jaquet-Droz family’s harpsichord player is an almost life-size figure of an approximately fifteen-year-old girl seated on a stool in front of a small organ (see fig. 1, page 3). The seated figure is about four feet high and is placed on a flat pedestal.¹ The instrument that she originally played was called a clavessin organisé or clavecin organique, a combination of harpsichord and organ that was primarily developed and used in the 1770s and 1780s in Vienna.² Such combined instruments were developed to amplify the sound in musical performances in domestic, semipublic, and public spaces. Father and son Jaquet-Droz may have chosen this instrument for the same reason. There are no eighteenth-century images of the harpsichord player, but nineteenth-century drawings suggest that the automaton was playing either a small organ or an organ-related instrument.³ The harpsichord player’s repertoire consists of five pieces that were most likely composed by Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz. Their formal structure (two stanzas and da capos) as well as their embellishments follow contemporary French and Italian fashion.⁴

Roentgen’s dulcimer player is arranged on a tabletop (see fig. 2, page 4). The figure is about one foot and nine inches high and supposedly depicts Marie-Antoinette, who was thirty years old when the automaton was presented to her. The instrument itself is large in relation to the figure: two feet and four inches long and one foot and two inches wide.⁵ It consists of a trapezoid-shaped sound box with twenty-three pairs of metal strings stretched over it. The automaton strikes the strings with two hammers, which are curved into a hook shape at their end. The instrument’s front end is shaped like a harpsichord to facilitate the automaton’s playing.6 The strings are parallel to the automaton’s forearms, with the bass notes arranged on the left and the treble on the right, in the same way as a piano keyboard. The automaton’s repertoire comprises eight melodies, seven of which are unidentified simple pieces in two voices; one is an aria from Gluck’s “Armide.” The overall ensemble, consisting of the comparatively small musician, her large instrument, and the table, is about four feet wide, two feet deep, and four feet high. This makes its overall height the same as the harpsichord player’s, so that both are at the eye level of a seated spectator.⁷

While the two women automata replicate similar cultural scenarios, there are differences between them in their size and geometry, in the degree of mechanical complexity of their inner machinery, and in the functions they served for their respective makers. The automata were designed around two different types of motion and two different types of musician-instrument interfaces and within two different sets of business relations. The dulcimer player was the inspiration of a cabinetmaker and was meant to promote his economic interest, not that of a clock-maker. This is manifest in the dulcimer player’s design as a music-playing piece of furniture that happens to take the form of a woman automaton. Father and son Jaquet-Droz, in contrast, built a complex piece of clockwork in the form of a woman playing the harpsichord.⁸ The dulcimer player, furthermore, was produced to be presented to Marie-Antoinette, similar to the way David Roentgen presented many other pieces of furniture to her. Soon after she received the automaton, she gave it to the Académie des Sciences, and it was probably never shown in public until the twentieth century. The Jaquet-Droz family, in contrast, presented their automaton in public and traveled with it for a while, before exhibiting it for a few years for charity purposes at hospitals in Geneva and La Chaux-de-Fonds and eventually selling it.9

Each automaton produces a captivating scenario of music-making. The harpsichord player does so on the basis of a life-size performance and realistic motions of arms, hands, and fingers, while the dulcimer player’s primary appeal resides in her miniature effect and the contrast between the instrument’s larger size and the small figure that minutely and precisely plays on it. The furniture surrounding the dulcimer player creates this miniature effect and emphasizes the delicacy of her musical play and motions. The music that the automata play is, in each case, a two-voice dance piece standard for the time from the genre of the suite, which had its origins and exemplary form in the period of seventeenth-century baroque.¹⁰ The musical compositions came out of preexisting expertise in the two workshops: Christoph Willibald Gluck had worked with Roentgen before, and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz had studied music and design for a few years in Nancy just before returning to his father’s house and helping build the harpsichord automaton.

The harpsichord player is technically and artistically more sophisticated than the dulcimer player. She is bigger, has more movable parts, and has a larger gestural and musical repertoire. The hammer-wielding dulcimer player does not require the same minute technical detail, since she needs no finger-moving mechanics. She also does not move her upper body. The most distinct moving parts apart from her arms, as pointed out in the letter from Marie-Antoinette’s physician to the Académie des Sciences, are her head and eyes.

Among the most important similarities between the two automata are the modules that conduct their musical play, a studded barrel and a camshaft. In both automata these two modules are combined in typical fashion by cutting the studded barrel into two half cylinders and putting the set of cams in the middle (figs. 4 and 5).¹¹ The two modules execute two different types of motion. While the cams direct the forearms’ horizontal, rotational motion and thus move the hand to the correct position above the keyboard, the studs on the barrel conduct the arms’ and hands’ vertical motion to produce a tone, in one case making the harpsichord player’s finger press a key and in the other making the dulcimer player’s hand release the hammer to hit a string and set it into vibration.

FIGURE 4 The harpsichord player’s back and her mechanism: pegged barrel and cam shaft. Photograph by Adelheid Voskuhl.

The cams and the studs, using different types of mechanical gears, encode different types of information, which are also decoded and transmitted in distinct ways. The cams, on the one hand, have encoded in their profiles information about the pitch, guiding the selection of the correct key or string to be played. As the cams revolve around their axis, levers positioned over the cams’ edges (the “cam followers”) function as readers and decipher the information on the cams’ profiles, which consist of continuous lines of crests and valleys. In the case of both automata, the lever’s motion on the cam’s crest is transformed into a rotation of the upper arm’s vertical axis. The resulting rotation in the elbow causes a sweeping motion of the forearms above the harpsichord’s keyboard or the dulcimer’s strings. Where the cam’s profile is more inclined, it produces greater motion; where it is flat, the motion stops (fig. 6). The ratio between the motion on the profile and the motion of the forearm is largest for the dulcimer player at 1 to 10, which means that a vertical displacement of 1 mm on the cam is translated into a lateral displacement of the hammer of 1 cm.¹²

FIGURE 5 The dulcimer player’s pegged barrel and cam shaft. © Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, Paris/photo P. Faligot.

The studs on the surface of the barrel, on the other hand, encode information about the music’s rhythm, that is, when and for how long the finger hits the key or the hammer the string.13 The studs direct the downward motion of each of the harpsichord player’s fingers to press a key or the dulcimer player’s hand to make the hammer strike a string (fig. 7). Unlike the continuous motion of the cams, the studs translate only into two discrete states: motion and rest. Fifty rows of studs, twenty-five on each half cylinder, conduct the harpsichord player’s fingers’ motion (fig. 4), and five levers on both sides (discernible just above each half cylinder) “read” five individual sequences of studs to control each finger. The cylinder automatically moves sideways by the width of one row of studs after each musical piece and thus makes possible the change of melody and the automaton’s repertoire of five musical pieces.¹⁴ The dulcimer player has sixteen rows of studs, eight on each side, one for each melody. This mechanism can play more melodies than the harpsichord player’s, with fewer studs and only one lever on each half cylinder, because there is no need to direct individual fingers’ motions.

FIGURE 6 Cam followers “read” the harpsichord player’s and the dulcimer player’s cams (harpsichord player above, dulcimer player below). Carrera, Loiseau, and Roux, Androiden, 74; La restauration musicale, 17.

The motions transmitted by the profiles on the cams and the studs on the cylinder combine their effects in the automata’s respective elbows, guiding in tandem the forearms’ horizontal and vertical motion and making the musical play possible (fig. 8). The cams prepare the correct position above the correct string, and the studs make the finger press the key or the hammer strike the string. It is crucial that the studs be exactly synchronized with the flat part of the cam, so that the finger or hammer moves downward only when the forearm is at rest and in the correct position.

The art of clock-making and mechanical engineering in the early modern period consisted at its core of transforming an engine’s original motion (in the case of the automata, a spring) into other types of motion.¹⁵ The two systems used here, spring-cam-follower and spring-cylinder-peg-reader, were two distinct eighteenth-century ways of solving this problem, as they transformed the circular, continuous motion of a spring into two other distinct types of motion: a linear, discontinuous motion of the automata’s forearms above the keyboard and a discrete up-and-down motion of the arm or finger. In the former case, the transmission functions through a system of rods, axles, and hinges and in the latter case through a set of relay motions. The combination of barrel and cams, as well as the art of transmitting and transforming motion via lever-hinge-axle systems, was by the mid-eighteenth century well known to specialist mechanics.

FIGURE 7 The harpsichord player’s and the dulcimer player’s pegged barrel and relay motion for hands and fingers (harpsichord player above, dulcimer player below). Carrera, Loiseau, and Roux, Androiden, 74; La restauration musicale, 17.

FIGURE 8 The motions encoded on the cams and the studs combine in the automata’s elbows (here shown for the case of the dulcimer player). © Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, Paris/photo P. Faligot.

Eighteenth-century literature on clock-making and mechanical engineering reflected and transmitted these principles. As the mechanical trades began to become systematized, the speed and depth of this modernization varied widely over Europe. Master clock-makers and scholars developed standards of training, formalized knowledge and skills, and wrote reference works for establishing and disseminating knowledge. There were treatises dealing with clock-making principles, instructions for designing clocks, and guides for repairing them. Some texts combined instruction in the mechanical arts with histories of the trade. While the centers of clock-making and writing about clock-making were in France and England, key works were translated into other languages and edited with comments.16

Some of the complex machinery in the Jaquet-Droz and Roentgen families’ automata stemmed from innovations specifically in the trade of clock-making, while other elements came from smaller and more specialized branches of the mechanical arts, such as the making of mechanical musical instruments or the mechanical interiors of luxury furniture. Musical mechanisms included flute-playing clocks (containing not flutes, per se, but rather flute-toned organ pipes), clockwork spinets, carillons of various sizes (from those for cathedrals or town halls to precious miniatures), music-playing automata, tobacco boxes, pendulum clocks, and singing-bird devices. Most musical devices followed the model described above: a stored musical program, an engine, and a sounding device. Between the engine and the program, there was normally a mechanical system to read and transmit the information, and between the program and the sounding device there was a mechanism that received signals and transmitted them to the sounding device. The standard device to provide the program was a barrel with some form of projections (normally studs and blocks) that corresponded to the notes to be sounded, their relationship to each other, and their duration, as in the case of both women automata. The standard mechanism to provide the transmission was some kind of a key frame that was positioned so that the barrel projections would raise a small lever, which would operate valves (for organs), or pull-downs (for bells), to produce the musical sounds. A substantial part of the expertise and skill for these systems came from the making and maintaining of cathedral clocks and mechanical theaters, as well as the musical and mechanical spectacles in royal gardens, of which mechanics and scholars such as Caspar Schott and Salomon de Caus were in charge.17

The other main mechanism in the Jaquet-Droz family’s harpsichord player, aside from the music-making one, is the “life mechanism,” which independently drives the automaton’s eyes, head, and breathing and is located underneath the barrel. The life mechanism is one of the most complicated in the automaton, not only because of the variety of effects that it is in charge of, but also because it is designed to run for one and a half hours. In a demonstration, the life mechanism can be started first to “prepare” the audience: the musician starts moving her head, eyes, and chest long before she starts playing the harpsichord. These preparatory motions are slow and regular, and they convey the rather captivating impression that the automaton is waking up and preparing her audience for the concert.¹⁸ The slow motion is achieved by a gear reduction in the transmission, which needs, above all, space and robust material for the resulting strong forces.¹⁹ It must have been one of the highest priorities in the Jaquet-Droz workshop to make this mechanism small enough to fit into the automaton: the artisans invested a great deal of effort into making the automaton perform precisely these subtle, slow, and graceful motions in addition to her music-making.

The life mechanism consists of many additional components (fig. 9). The mainspring with a spiral thread and five other revolving devices can be seen in the middle of the picture.20 At the bottom is a brass double cam and three levers that produce the nodding and turning of the head. To the left are three levers that make the automaton seem to breathe by raising and lowering her chest at regular intervals—a bodily motion that captured commentators’ attention.²¹ At the top of the picture are the four cams and two levers that move the eyes: two for moving up and down, two for moving left and right. Only one of the four cams for the eyes’ movement has cogs (the one at the bottom of the group). It functions as an interrupter and enables the cams to vary their positions in relation to one another. This feature allows the automaton to never repeat the movements of her eyes over the course of three quarters of an hour.

FIGURE 9 Individual parts of the harpsichord player’s “life mechanism.” Carrera, Loiseau, and Roux, Androiden, 79.

The dulcimer player also has “added” complexity in the design of her mechanism to make her move her head and eyes: in her case, an extra device is found to the right of the barrel. The figure’s vertical head and eye movements are directed through this mechanism, which consists of an extra cam, with a follower reading its information, and a set of rods transmitting the motion upward and to the (left) side, above the cylinder. Here, the motion is translated onto a long vertical rod that reaches all the way into the dulcimer player’s head. The synchronicity of motion is accomplished by attaching all motions (musical and nonmusical) to one and the same cylinder. The head’s horizontal motion is accomplished similarly through an extra system that translates the cylinder’s rotational motion into a rotation around an axis turned by ninety degrees.22

In the case of the harpsichord player, one of the most eye-catching parts of her performance is the bow with which she finishes each of the five melodies. That mechanism is set in motion by the main clockwork once a melody has come to an end. It consists of three rotating devices that drive three cams and is located in the lower part of the automaton’s body, beneath the barrel (fig. 10).²³ The rods sitting on the cams follow their profiles and transmit the various motions to the upper body and the head. The automaton not only bends her upper body; she bows her head simultaneously and turns it to the left and the right, while rolling her eyes sideways and up and down.

FIGURE 10 The harpsichord player’s bow mechanism, located in the lower part of the automaton’s body beneath the barrel. Carrera, Loiseau, and Roux, Androiden, 75.

The mechanism for the harpsichord player’s bow is doubly complex: on the one hand, the profiles of the cams of the bowing mechanism are much smaller than the profiles of the other cams; on the other, the rotation speed is very high, which allows the bow—lasting six to eight seconds—to seem rather natural and real but also puts a great deal of strain on the mechanical parts. The gear reduction necessary for this motion therefore entails difficulty over space and robustness similar to that we saw in the case of the life mechanism. The bow mechanism is also subject to further stress and strain. The levers and cams not only have to lift the long rods in the automaton’s upper body, enabling the bow, but they also have to release the functions of the other body parts. In addition, it takes a significant amount of force to make half of the automaton’s body bend forward slowly. Two springs make the upper body move upward again after the bow.24

The automata’s nodding and eye movement and the harpsichord player’s life mechanism, breathing, and extended bow are all evidence of the automata’s elaborate mechanisms that their makers designed to allow elegant, appealing, and entertaining movements during their musical play as well as (in the case of the harpsichord player) before and after playing and between musical selections. For each component of their performance, there is a piece of machinery that brings about a particular effect. These individual elements of the automata’s routines have important effects in their overall performance, as they distract and charm the spectator and provide compelling instances of verisimilitude, “natural” motion, and grace. The automata’s technical architectures demonstrate that the artisans designed their automata to perform well-planned, precise, and minutely conceived musical-mechanical spectacles. Perhaps the key example of the artisans’ success in this endeavor is the fact that the one contemporary report about the dulcimer player stresses that her eye movements are in rhythm with the music, while, in reality, her eyes move exclusively through their own inertia. The only driven motion is the motion of the head.²⁵

It is not known for certain whether Roentgen knew about the Jaquet-Droz harpsichord player or whether he even saw it, but both are possible. The Jaquet-Droz automata were taken to Paris in January of 1775, and Roentgen was in Paris around this time. It is plausible that he moved in circles that overlapped with the Jaquet-Droz family’, given that they were artisans of similar rank, type, and ambition. There were also reports on the Jaquet-Droz automata published in various popular periodicals, and Roentgen may have read about them. If in fact the Jaquet-Droz harpsichord player was an inspiration for David Roentgen, it was not an immediate one. Six years passed between the time of Roentgen’s first visit to the French court and the delivery of the dulcimer player to Marie-Antoinette.26

The two women automata replicate mechanically a captivating and recognizable cultural scenario of the eighteenth century—music-playing women moving their bodies. The cultural and political relevance of the scenario predates the professional lives of the artisan families Jaquet-Droz and Roentgen-Kinzing. Imagery and ideas of music-playing women were prevalent during the second half of the eighteenth century and most likely were accessible to both automaton makers, as was the idea of bodily motion to communicate affects. Both sets of artisans were unusually educated and knew about contemporary tastes and fashions in the arts, literature, and music. Furthermore, women’s musical play and body technique were part of larger political concerns in eighteenth-century Europe. They intersected with sexual politics, sentimental politics, and the politics of social order.

Women and Music

Women occupied a special place in eighteenth-century musical practice, as they did in the Enlightenment as a whole.²⁷ They were regularly both subjects and objects of discussions about such key topics as universality, equality, rationality, autonomy, and civilization, and sexual difference thus remained a knotty issue for the Enlightenment’s central ambitions and tenets. And while the social and cultural worlds of the Enlightenment often remained the exclusive realm of men, making and listening to music were to some degree, and in specific ways, exceptions to this.

The polarization of the sexes was, like many other aspects of eighteenth-century societies, more varied and less consistent than is often assumed. There remained a great deal of variability in what it meant to be a woman, and even more in what it meant to be a man, much more so than in the nineteenth century, when polarity between men and women was lived and thought in a more rigid way than at any time before or after.28 The emergence of a new bourgeois lifeworld in the eighteenth century, outside of the traditional orders of the ancien régime and the estate society, entailed a transformation of virtually all categories of life, including sex and gender. In a momentous shift, sexual difference was no longer justified on the particular basis of estate but instead on the universal basis of nature. In this new schema, the subordination of women was not a confinement but a demand that stemmed from reason, because reason could recognize sexual difference as being constituted in nature.

The emergence of amateur musicianship in the seventeenth-century French aristocracy was an important backdrop to eighteenth-century women’s musicianship. Seventeenth-century noble families often entrusted their children (including their daughters) to composers and tutors, generating a tradition of early musical education. Noblewomen sang and played instruments for individual entertainment, and some were in a position to pay for a small staff of musicians (sometimes even including a composer) for larger and more formal settings.²⁹ The women members of the French royal family, notably the wives and mistresses of the Bourbon kings, thus established a tradition of music-making, chamber concerts, and other entertainments. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, during the reign of Louis XIV, professional performances were established, and as Julie Anne Sadie explains, such practices were “followed at court” and “widely imitated.”³⁰ Musical activities subsequently migrated from France to courts on the entire European continent.

The spread of musical activity created a small but significant economic and professional infrastructure for women, primarily lower- and mid-level aristocrats, as they began to find appointments as singers and, to a lesser degree, instrumentalists in court musical establishments. Marie-Antoinette, allegedly the model for one of my women automata, was particularly well known for her love of and taste in music. She was educated in the French language and culture and was taught the harpsichord and the harp in preparation for her marriage to the dauphin. When she moved to Versailles after her wedding, she continued to be an active musician and organizer of concerts, as well as a patron of composers.31

The number of women involved in domestic music-making increased significantly during the eighteenth century. Bourgeois circles and the expanding middle classes started adopting musical practices from the aristocracy and evolved their own set of ideas and expectations around music-playing women.³² Music-playing filled leisure time and drove away ennui. A music-making woman, furthermore, was considered socially accomplished, having a kind of currency that reflected on the gentility of her family. In the case of young women, musical ability ideally led to a good matrimonial match. There were other accomplishments, too, that were conducive to marriage, such as drawing and needlework, but music was a favorite since “it could be shown off best while actually being accomplished.”³³ Julie Anne Sadie argues that because women were teaching, performing, writing, composing, and advertising their skills in musical almanacs, “music-making had become a socially less self-conscious pursuit,” and she observes a “general broadening of society’s attitudes” toward women musicians in the course of the eighteenth century.³⁴ This greater visibility also became manifest in the two women automata.

In general, women played instruments that were considered sufficiently “feminine,” such as the lute, the harp, or the harpsichord, and that could accompany the musician’s own voice.³⁵ The social grace displayed in instrument-playing and singing could secure a diverse set of social assets, such as proving marriageability but also playing before members of the aristocracy. A music-playing woman was a cultural scenario with valences that could sometimes transgress the boundaries of class, estate, and sex. These boundaries were indeed crossed when Roentgen presented his dulcimer player to the king and queen: a (mechanical) music-making woman facilitated an artisan’s entry into the court society.36

Contributing equally to the cultural meanings of a woman’s music-playing was the connection of music-making to sentiment, a notion deeply tied to ideas about morals, class, and the new social order of civil society. The “sentimental age” in the eighteenth century took on a variety of forms in France, England, and the German lands. The shared ground among them was an increased attention to the “inner life” of individuals and to the individuation of feeling.³⁷ This was in contrast to earlier periods when human affects in general and their moral, political, and epistemic relevance had been a concern to moral and natural philosophers.³⁸ The changing uses of the term sentimentality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflect this history. The French term sensibilité, for example, described originally, and more narrowly, the quality of being sensitive to physical impressions, the ability to sense, or something that touches the senses.³⁹ In the course of the eighteenth century, it gradually took on intellectual and affective denotations and connotations; it came to refer to larger concepts such as “the faculty of perceiving moral impressions” or “the sentiment of humanity, piety, and tenderness.”⁴⁰ In this broader sense, the adjective sensible came to describe someone who was able to feel a moral impression or be easily moved, to have human sentiments.41

There developed, thus, a decidedly moral and social dimension to the idea of sentiment in the eighteenth century, as it came to describe and prescribe one’s ability to participate incisively in one’s own and other people’s sentiments. In particular the French term sensibilité and the German term Empfindsamkeit (as well as the adjective gerührt, referring to stirred sentiments) came to denote a social movement.⁴² German pedagogues, philosophers, and theologians conceived of Empfindsamkeit as involving an ability or inclination to have “tender and pleasant sentiments” (a meaning similar to that which developed for sensibilité in France), and they extended this meaning to the ability to enjoy the participation in one’s own and other people’s sentimental life, “to feel pleasure in participating in the soul’s motions.”⁴³ The most important moral dimension of Empfindsamkeit—its connection to duty—was established in the same way. Karl Daniel Küster, a preacher and theologian in Magdeburg, wrote that a sensitive person was someone who had a disposition of mind and heart that would make him receive “quick and strong insights into his duties and feel an effective drive to do good.”⁴⁴ Tutors and pedagogues were expected to develop this sentimental and virtuous disposition in anyone who participated in the common good: princes and princesses, ministers, lawyers, pastors, teachers and peasants.45

In this way, the culture of sentiment helped define the emerging fields of pedagogy, popular philosophy, and politics, all of which played foundational roles in the dissemination and implementation of the moral tenets of the Enlightenment. The main medium for this dissemination in the German-speaking context was the “moral weekly periodical” (Moralische Wochenzeitschrift), which provided pedagogical and religious reading material for large audiences.⁴⁶ There were hundreds of such periodicals in circulation, including in smaller towns. Their number, along with their readership, increased massively during the second half of the eighteenth century. Just as reading had become a common leisure occupation and a mode of sociability in clubs and associations, it also came to be thought of as a way to develop moral and aesthetic guidelines.⁴⁷ The sentimental dimension was once again crucial: popular philosophers defined ethics as “teachings of the art of feeling” (Lehre von der Gefühlskunst), conceiving of feeling as a condition for humans to be prepared for meaningful and moral action.⁴⁸ Because this view raised questions about the (outward) representation of affects, theories of mimicry and acting became relevant, and those theories, in turn, defined the position of a spectator who deduced from mimicry of others’ bodily motions the corresponding states of their souls. Such a scenario, in combination with music-making, is what Johann Richter explores in a satire, discussed in chapter 5.

The intersection of musical culture and marriage in women’s lives is a particularly interesting focal point for investigating the increasing moral, aesthetic, and political relevance of music-playing women and music-playing women automata. Ideas about music and marriage were explicated in contemporary periodicals that were the equivalent for women of the “moral weeklies.” One of them was the monthly Amaliens Erholungsstunden, which Marianne Ehrmann (née Brentano) edited in the late eighteenth century. The journal was initially distributed by a small publishing house that she ran with her husband, but after a year it became so successful that they negotiated a transfer to the eminent publisher Friedrich Cotta in Stuttgart.⁵¹ Among other topics, Amaliens Erholungsstunden featured articles on “feminine occupations.” Ehrmann’s concern was to share her life experience and to teach adolescent girls about marriage. She wrote that in order to achieve a durable marriage, several things had to be in place: the right husband, an orderly house, and also reading and friendships. Alongside the manifold duties and virtuous activities of middle-class women, Ehrmann listed music-making as an appropriate activity, since musical education and practice contributed, like reading, to the formation of taste and feeling. She emphasized the importance of feeling by pointing out how easily, in her age, one could be accused of being “without feeling” (fühllos).⁵² Like many contemporary pedagogues, Ehrmann was concerned with the right balance of feeling, reason, duty, and moderation, and she looked at these issues specifically through the lens of music-making women and marriage.53 Reading and music-making enhanced a woman’s marriageability, because they made her a better companion for her husband, a better mother, and a better instructor for her servants. Being well-read and musically educated could even offset poverty or lack of beauty. Cultural historians describe the flip side of this coin: as soon as the educated woman went too far and became too well-read, she was no longer deemed desirable and became a subject of malicious caricatures. It was a fine line that women had to walk; and the balances that the culture of sentiments required, and the limits required within that culture, were often imagined in terms of women.⁵⁴

The increasing interest in music-playing and musical education also created a market for music teachers and drove sales of printed music, instruction manuals, and poetry or paintings about music playing, including those that utilized the motif of the keyboard-playing woman. There was a growing demand in particular for musical compositions—such as solo pieces for piano, violin, or flute and songs for piano accompaniment—that catered to the new market, often in the form of collections of chamber music dedicated by composers to their aristocratic pupils or individual pieces named after them. Increasingly, women became the addressees of collections advertised as “for the sentimental piano player” or “for feeling souls” or “for heart and feeling.” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach himself wrote a collection titled “Six sonatas for the clavecin to be used by ladies.”⁵⁵ Johann Martin Miller, a Göttingen-based poet, wrote poems on the same motif, entitled “At Daphne’s piano” (1773), “Praise of a girl. At the piano” (1773), and “As Mariane was singing at the Piano: At midnight” (1775).⁵⁶

Contemporary art similarly reacted to this interest in the culture of women’s music-playing. Engravers produced prints of young ladies playing musical instruments, and the works depicting keyboard instruments in general were particularly likely to feature women. The majority of Dutch paintings from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century showing keyboard instruments, in fact, display female players.57 The harpsichord and the organ remained popular instruments for women well into the eighteenth century, before the piano emerged as an alternative. Such representations were probably how the artisan families Jaquet-Droz and Roentgen-Kinzing became familiar with the motif.

Music and Sentiment

Already in the early eighteenth century, questions revolving around sentiments had been raised in music theory and practice. As the discussion progressed through the century, sentiments were also discussed in relation to the musician’s moving body. In the 1720s, as Renaissance and early modern ideas about aesthetics, representation, and metaphysics were being recast, musicians and composers began to devise general theories of music.⁵⁸ In the early 1700s it was still accepted that the individual arts (literature, theater, sculpture, and painting) were fundamentally related to each other through the common purpose of mimesis of nature, allowing those formulating theoretical foundations for music to rely on established aesthetic theories.⁵⁹ One commonly held tie between literature, music, and the other arts was their role in generating affects. Composers and music theorists explicitly made the representation and generation of affects a shared goal of composers and performers. In doing so, they relied on, and developed further, theories of affect from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had relied on categories from natural philosophy and also had borrowed from hermeticism and ancient cosmological speculation.60 These early modern theories attempted homologies between the elements, the humors, and the temperaments, while also taking up newly emerging Cartesian modes of thought.⁶¹

As eighteenth-century theorists took on these traditions, the relationship between affects and musical theory and practice became more complex.⁶² In the later eighteenth century, theorists of affect in music came to include composers, critics, journalists, and publishers.⁶³ Many among them agreed that music should represent and generate passions, but there was less consensus about concrete theoretical and practical implications of this principle.⁶⁴ These theorists developed taxonomies in which musical forms (such as intervals, keys, styles, meters, and rhythms) correlated with certain affective values, but it was more difficult to formulate fundamental definitions and categorizations.⁶⁵

Johann Mattheson’s 1739 encyclopedic treatise Der vollkommene Capellmeister (The perfect musical director) had an influence that was second perhaps only to Rousseau’s works on music. Mattheson assembled nearly everything that was available on musical theory and practice at the time, demonstrating an unusual breadth of musical experience.66 He developed in the Capellmeister a general theory of music, which he hoped would guide composers in their everyday work. One specific ambition of his, articulated very much in the fashion of the Early Enlightenment, was to constitute the relationship between musical expression and morality, by showing how music could provide pleasure and promote virtue. He formulated the true goal of a melody as being the stirring of the passions of the soul, and he appealed to composers to write only music that moved the listener (this goal is listed immediately next to another fundamental one, expressing the glory of God).⁶⁷ Mattheson required that all music express the passions and have a moderating, and thus moral, effect; he claimed that a composer who was moved by passions himself would know how “to express all the movements of the heart . . . as if it were a real speech.”⁶⁸ For Mattheson, the inclinations of the soul were the true matter of virtue, and virtue was nothing but a well-adjusted and wisely moderated sentimental motion: “Where there is no passion, no affect, there is no virtue.”⁶⁹ He thus considered music to be part of ethics (Sittenlehre) and its true characteristic to be a theory of morals and order (Zucht-Lehre) above others.⁷⁰ Under his theory, a perfect musician (Tonmeister) had to master this art if he wanted to represent virtues and vices with his sounds and instill in the listener’s mind love for virtue and loathing for vices.

Musical theorists and popular philosophers who engaged Mattheson’s work highlighted different aspects of it. For pedagogues, it was a guide that confirmed the intersection of affect and pedagogy, emphasizing the importance of tempering the minds and souls of children, women (as future wives), future civil servants, and future monarchs. These pedagogues integrated music into their handbooks of popular philosophy.⁷¹ Further musical-theoretical works followed in the mid-eighteenth century. They represented an intensifying interest in and engagement with affect theory in music.72 Even works in the later eighteenth century, such as Heinrich Christoph Koch’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, of 1782, were based on the idea that the subject (Gegenstand) of music was the generation and expression of the sentiments.⁷³

The connection between art, affect, and virtue was also constituted in general theories of aesthetics. Johann Georg Sulzer wrote an encyclopedia of the arts in the 1770s that became the most widely read work of its kind in the last part of the eighteenth century.⁷⁴ He claimed a privileged status for the arts, music in particular, in regard to the cultivation of sentiments and passions.⁷⁵ His article on passions (Leidenschaften) stated, in a manner by then familiar, that an immediate purpose of an artist was to provoke or calm passions. He talked about the affects, their true nature, the ways they expressed themselves, and their good and bad effects. In order for artists to have precise control over the affects, Sulzer demanded that they have acute knowledge of these affects’ nature and origins, echoing Mattheson’s and others’ call to educate musicians in matters of sentiment.⁷⁶ He singled out music among all the arts, arguing that it might be the most powerful because it affected the nervous system most directly and most forcefully.⁷⁷ Similarly, Sulzer’s article on sentiments (Empfindung) resonated strongly with the moral reflections of theorists of musical-sentimental culture. He conceived of sentiments as driving behavior and claimed that the arts, through their sentimental effects, were capable of implanting proper inclinations (love of one’s country, virtuousness, honesty, gratitude, true honor, freedom, and humanity) in individuals. For him, art’s purpose needed to be an “orderly sentimentality of the heart.” Sulzer warned, however, that the measure and moderation of sentiment could not be transgressed, and he mentioned unmanliness as one potential hazard. His target was poets, in particular, since they seemed to think there could never be enough stimulation for the soul. Sulzer’s thoughts culminated in his claims about the relevance of art and affect to the common good and social order. He argued that if the sentiments (of honor, honesty, lawfulness, etc.) that sustained social cohesion and prosperity were too weak, then a society would be doomed.78

Alongside handbooks on composition and orchestra management, and theoretical and encyclopedic works on the arts, manuals for playing specific instruments also became popular. These books also dealt with the process of generating affects, typically focusing on recital performances. By focusing on practice and catering to a wider audience, instrument manuals contributed to the establishment and dissemination of the culture of affects in music. The expanding bourgeois practice of music-making, bolstered by bourgeois notions about education and cultivation, created a market for such works. Though indebted to rhetorical and aesthetic theory, these manuals were not as academic in their instruction and terminology as the more specialized works just discussed.⁷⁹

In my context of the two music-playing women automata, it is particularly relevant what musical theorists and pedagogues said about performance practice. Among the most influential authors on performance practice (remaining so to this day) were Johann Joachim Quantz and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Both received appointments at the court of Frederick II (later called “the Great”) when he became king in 1740. Quantz, a composer and Frederick’s flute teacher, was the author of the Essay of an Instruction to Play the Transverse Flute, published in 1752. His Essay was a foundational work, quickly going through several editions, with multiple translations following from the 1750s to the 1790s. Quantz had received his musical training around 1720 as a young man at the court of Frederick August I (called “the Strong”) in Dresden, and he remained faithful for the rest of his life to the theories and practices of music-making that he learned there. Under his control, from 1741 until his death in 1773, the musical life at Frederick II’s court remained rather conservative.⁸⁰ Quantz was a committed pedagogue, however, and was deeply influenced by the German Early Enlightenment. He emphasized not merely mimetic musical play but also intellectual challenge, as well as the development of good taste and judgment, in a musician.81 The attempt in his “Essay” to systematize musical performance practice was a groundbreaking project at the time, both in regard to musical performance itself and in regard to musical performance’s larger culture and economics.⁸²

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) was one of Johann Sebastian’s sons and a—maybe the—leading musician and musical theoretician of his time. The two volumes of his treatise “Essay on the true manner of playing the piano” were published in 1753 and 1762, respectively. Like Quantz, he was employed at the court of Frederick II when he wrote his treatise. Bach was perhaps the best academically trained musician of his time, and his treatise on piano-playing became one of three foundational piano tutorials.⁸³ After François Couperin’s work L’art de toucher le clavecin, of 1717, Bach’s was only the second actual textbook for piano-playing that had ever been written. It had a profound influence on other piano-playing textbooks written in the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s.⁸⁴ It resembles Quantz’s work in form and organization, as well as in some details of the content and the phrasing of the chapter headings.⁸⁵

Quantz’s essay on flute-playing is divided into eighteen chapters. In the introduction, he outlines the talents and personality traits needed by those who want to devote themselves to music and, by extension, to the common good. The individual chapters deal with topics such as the history of the transverse flute, posture, fingering, scales, embouchure, the musical sign system, the use of the tongue and lips when playing, breathing, embellishments, cadenzas, accompaniment, performance in general, and assessment of performance.

Throughout the chapters that deal with practical matters of playing and performing, Quantz makes explicit the correlation between musical material and affects. For example, in the ninth chapter, on appoggiaturas, in addition to describing their function and proper execution, he explains that certain ornaments, depending on the character of the piece, serve the purpose of inducing cheer or happiness, whereas others soothe or sadden.86 In chapter 12, “How to play the allegro” (“Von der Art das Allegro zu spielen”), he explains that “what is funny” is expressed through short notes that move in small and large intervals; that “the glorious” is expressed through long notes that are accompanied with fast movements in the other voices, as well as through dotted notes; and that “flattering” is expressed both through dragged and drawn-out notes that go up and down in small steps and through syncopation.⁸⁷ In chapter 15, on cadences, Quantz explains that the purpose of a beautiful cadence is to surprise listeners toward the end of a movement in order to leave a special impression in their hearts, a new and touching (rührend) sense of astonishment, thus driving the desired provocation of affects to an extreme.⁸⁸

Quantz’s chapter 11 deals specifically with performance practice and is entitled “On good performances in singing and playing in general” (“Vom guten Vortrage im Singen und Spielen überhaupt”). Like other musical theorists before him, Quantz borrows from the theory of rhetorical forms. The chapter’s often-quoted opening paragraph formulates the close relation between rhetoric and music: “The musical recital can be compared with the performance of a speaker. A speaker and a musician have one and the same intention . . . , namely: to win the hearts, to excite and calm the passions, and to set the listeners now into this, then into that, affect.”⁸⁹ Quantz then lists characteristics of a successful performance, including correct and clear intonation, an easy and flowing presentation of the notes, a varied and multifarious performance, and an effort that “light and shadow be continuously engaged.” Quantz’s final criterion concerns the expression of passions. He says that “a good recital, finally, has to be expressive and in accordance with each passion that comes up.” In an allegro, for example, it would be liveliness; in an adagio, it would be tenderness. Quantz explains that in order to generate those affects in the listeners, “the performer must aim to put himself into those . . . passions that he is meant to express,” thus emphasizing that the musician must generate the affects first in himself, according to the score’s instructions, and then communicate them to his audience.⁹⁰

Quantz then illustrates the progression of these processes over the course of a performance, asking the musician to precisely control the sequencing of affects generated in himself and in the audience. Based on the musician’s ability to exercise this control, Quantz eventually derives a criterion for a successful performance: “One would have to set oneself, so to speak, into a different affect with each bar, in order to be now sad, then merry, then grave, and so on . . . He who is able to master this art appropriately will not easily miss out on the listener’s approval, and his performance will thus always be affectively moving (“rührend”).”91 A successful recital, then, is one that stimulates affective involvement—Rührung—in the audience, by means of the musician’s own Rührung communicated in a precise and well-timed sequence, according to the pattern put forward by the musical piece. This key concept of Rührung was a part of the broader German-speaking terminology revolving around the eighteenth-century notion of Empfindsamkeit, and it connoted in particular the social, the relational, and the causal relationships that made someone feel something because of her or his interaction with another person or entity. Rührung appears at a central point in Quantz’s work, in his concluding passage on the relationship between the musician’s and the audience’s set of feelings. The poet Richter uses the term Rührung in exactly the same context in his satire that I read in chapter 5.

Corresponding passages from C. P. E. Bach’s work on piano-playing express similar ideas, and they also make explicit the connection between the musician’s communication of affects to the audience and his or her bodily motions. Bach’s work breaks down into two main parts. The first is a general section on fingering, manners (embellishments), and principles of the musical recital; the second is specifically about accompaniment—one of the key functions of a keyboard instrument. Bach states early in his work that three elements—fingering, manner, and public performance—constitute the “veritable method of playing the piano.”⁹² Bach’s textbook aimed to subject the entire practical art of piano-playing to a theoretical analysis, particularly in his detailed chapters on manners, affects, improvisation, harmony, and basso continuo. This ambition toward a “complete” theory was very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment and contributed to the work’s influence.

The third section of the book’s first part is the most relevant to my case. Its title, “On recital” (“Vom Vortrage”), is similar to the title of Quantz’s analogous section. Like Quantz, Bach begins by expounding criteria for good (and bad) recitals. According to him, a good recital consists of “nothing else but the ability to make musical thoughts transparent and sensitive in their true content and affect to the ear, either in singing or in playing.” His definition of a bad recital is also worth noting: “The subjects of a performance are the strengths and weaknesses of the tunes, their pressure, flicking, pulling, pushing, thrust, breaking, holding, dragging, persisting, and moving forward. He who uses these things either not at all or at the wrong time has a bad recital.”93 This rather odd-sounding enumeration of the tunes’ “activities”—it comes across even more powerfully in the original German—vividly illustrates the dynamics of shaping and sequencing musical tunes in a musical performance.

The communication of the musician’s affects to the audience is as important in Bach’s textbook as it is in Quantz’s. Just as Quantz says that the musician has to “set [himself] . . . into a different affect with each bar,” Bach equally emphasizes how the musician has to generate affects in himself first in order to communicate them to the audience: “And because a musician cannot move others [affectively] unless he is moved himself, he thus has to put himself into all the affects that he intends to arouse in his audience; he conveys his sentiments to them, and this is the best way to make them feel the same, along with him.” Bach demands further that a musician, accordingly, should be dull and sad during dull and sad passages and merry and fierce during merry and fierce passages. According to Bach, this results in a dynamic process in which “once the musician has calmed one affect, he arouses another one. He thus constantly alternates between the different passions.”⁹⁴

Ultimately, Bach links the musician’s ability to excite and calm the correct affects at the correct times—or, as he puts it, the musician’s ability to “appropriate his listeners’ hearts”—to the musician’s bodily motions. He argues: “That all this could happen without any gestures and motions would only be denied by someone who is forced through his lack of sensitivity to sit before the instrument like a piece of carved wood.”⁹⁵

Taken together, such passages in Quantz’s and Bach’s works emphasize that in the course of a musical performance, a good eighteenth-century musician was supposed to arouse the correct sequence of affects in the audience according to the program put forward by the musical piece. The musician was meant to do this by first generating these affects in himself and then communicating them, not least through his own bodily motions, precisely and effectively to the listeners.

It is significant that, when they explain these dynamics, Bach and Quantz make the process sound as if the musician could, like a machine, “switch on and off” the affects in himself and in the audience, as if he could use his moving body as the shifter for such on-and-off switching of sentiments. The rhetoric of control, and the pedagogical and paternalistic tone in which the textbooks are written, add a peculiarly “mechanical” flavor to Bach’s and Quantz’s elucidations and instructions on how to play musical pieces in public. Despite Bach’s use of the metaphor of a “piece of carved wood” as an example of what not to be, musical performance is portrayed as a rather mechanical business in crucial passages of Quantz’s and Bach’s pedagogical works.

This ambiguity between expressive musical play and mechanical motion is clearly exhibited in the automata, while they also challenge the boundary between sentimental human music-making and machine behavior. The instability of the music-machine boundary here, akin to the human-machine boundary, is exploited at great length in the work of the poet Johann Paul Friedrich, whose satires I analyze in chapter 5. In the rest of this chapter, I explore the significance of “sentiment” in the broader society and then return, in the conclusion, to the relevance of the music-machine ambiguity in the automata and in the pedagogical literature of Bach and Quantz.

Sentimentality in Eighteenth-Century Society

The phenomenon of sentimental music-playing, as outlined, not least, in textbooks such as Quantz’s and C. P. E. Bach’s, provides a telling microcosm of broader efforts to found a new social order, efforts in which sentimentality played a large role. The sentimental project took a variety of forms in Europe and was manifest in virtually all realms of society, culture, and politics: literary production and reception, friendship and letter writing, travel, moral and natural philosophy, music-making, and conceptions of marriage and child-rearing. Such widespread attention to sentimental activity was an outgrowth of the fact that, at a theoretical and conceptual level, affects and their theoretical foundation were in one way or another relevant to the entire program of the Enlightenment.96

Because the idea of sensibility (French sensibilité and German Empfindsamkeit) described an attitude involving the ability and inclination to feel and engage with one’s own and other people’s sentimental motions, there was a decidedly social, moral, and political dimension to it. Sensibility was, furthermore, not only about being easily excited or moved, but also about an interest in one’s own “inner self,” introspection, and the constitution of one’s selfhood. The criterion for one’s inclusion in sentimental culture was not the intensity of one’s affect as such, but rather one’s general disposition toward being easily moved by someone or something else. Peter Hohendahl even calls the sentimental disposition a “dialectical” relationship in which the subject finds and experiences itself. The subject’s sentiments, according to this idea, are not “about” the external stimulus that brings them into being, but rather about the soul’s reflection on its own motion. Hohendahl suggests that this reflexivity generates a “peculiar refraction” in which the feeling subject encounters itself. The culture of affect, in his view, builds on this type of deliberate self-experience in which it is not feelings as such that are sentimental, but rather the individual who is conscious of them.⁹⁷

Hohendahl’s view of sensibility helps us understand more clearly the mechanical reproduction of the subject-formation process. As the two women automata perform motions that are meant to generate affects in their audience, Hohendahl’s proposition raises the question of whether the automata also reproduce mechanically their own reflexive relationship to their experience of sentimental motion, and therefore whether such mechanical feeling and corresponding self-awareness would be visible to a spectator. In one direction, this question leads directly to the more modern question of machine consciousness and the various thought experiments with which, since the mid-twentieth century, philosophers and scientists have debated about an ob server’s ability to tell whether a machine is conscious.⁹⁸ I want to pursue Hohendahl’s insight in another direction. My focus is on sentimental culture in eighteenth-century Europe and on the artisanal and musical production of sentimental selfhood. I discussed artisanal production in the first part of this chapter and dealt subsequently with musical literature and production. My contention is that the two types of cultural production together bring into being the mechanical replication of subject-formation, of self-experience, and of spectatorship and thus raise the question of how “real” and reliable this process is in regard to its social and mechanical dissemination. This potential instability of sentimental-reflexive culture, along with the potential impossibility of its engendering a new social order, is also, once again, the subject of my reading of Richter’s text in chapter 5.

In the German lands, more than in other European territories, sentimental culture had a political dimension. Empfindsamkeit both referred to a pattern of bourgeois communication and self-understanding and expressed a political ambition. Other large European states had developed centralized units governing large territories, but there was no comparable national unit for the German-speaking territories, no overarching organizational structure that would allow political participation for the emerging, and increasingly self-confident, middle classes. The traditional estate society and elements of the court society were still flourishing in most areas, and political rulers continued to govern on the basis of absolutist notions. In eighteenth-century Germany, there was no nation-state and citizens; instead, there were subjects and rulers.⁹⁹ Court culture entailed specific models of social relations that reached widely into the rest of society. Conduct at court was structured through restrictions, codes, and etiquette and rarely allowed relationships of continuity and mutual trust outside of these rules. The pressure to participate in the ceremony and hierarchy that represented power at court (and also the fierce competition for the ruler’s attention) meant that interaction was ruled by rigid tactics. Having friendships was good and useful, although not as a way of increased sociability, but rather as a strategic move and advantage.¹⁰⁰

However, in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a “cultural” nation was emerging in the German-speaking lands.101 It included a specific understanding of the German language and a shared legacy of literature and culture. The practical innovations of the German Enlightenment—in legislation, jurisdiction, agriculture, artisanship, technical progress, hygiene, and pedagogy—went hand in hand with the explosively increasing membership in reading societies and in the readerships of periodicals and newspapers.¹⁰² Inculcated by these and other means, major concepts and principles of the Enlightenment—among them self-responsibility, dissemination of knowledge, improvement of morals, and sanctioned social interaction—created a bourgeois identity that stood in profound tension with the legal and social structures of the estate and court society and the small territories in the Holy Roman Empire that were run as absolutist states. Sentimental and virtuous practices in reading and music were key features of this new bourgeois identity. Indeed, in the eighteenth century feeling, publicness, and intimacy were closely linked in a way that does not correspond to customs in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In this political context, feelings served as a guide to interaction and as the basis of a utopian theory of society. From letter-writing, reading societies, and music-making, sentimental speech and interaction extended to the political sphere, functioning as an alternative to the courtly-feudal social rationality. The sentimental movement did not formulate a developed critique of or challenge to the court society. But its ethical system did slowly and continuously undermine the social rationality specific to life at court. Sentimentality provided a moralizing theory of society that was directed toward equality (at least in theory) and sociability, and it was for a long time not attached to a particular political macrostructure. It was thus a form of interaction that, in a very Enlightenment manner, was considered appropriate to humans in their very nature.¹⁰³

Yet, while the new sentimental social behavior thought itself unconventional and novel, it often also proved schematic, rule-governed, and indeed “mechanical.” I identified an undercurrent of this tendency in my readings of Quantz’s and C. P. E. Bach’s textbooks.104 Critics of sentimental culture used, among other tools, metaphors of mechanical reproduction to illustrate the sentimental movement’s flaws and instabilities. The young poet Richter specifically targets the mechanical nature of sentimental music-making in a satire and uses music-playing women automata as a motif (see chapter 5).

In the Enlightenment, there was not only deliberate thinking but also deliberate feeling.¹⁰⁵ But “feeling” was not a singular activity, since there were considerable variety and complexity in views of sentimentality. For example, feelings were considered neither primarily irrational nor primarily feminine. Men were not always and necessarily “public” and “professional,” and women not always and necessarily domestic and sentimental. And feelings played a role not only in friendship, family, and social and political institutions, but also in the social and economic makeup of the actual spaces of private houses, as those became sites for communicative “publicness” in the emerging middle classes (such as in musical recitals). Everyday noninstitutional sociabilities, organized by men and sometimes by women, became crucial sites of bourgeois culture.¹⁰⁶ The private-public boundary, and its relation to gender and the culture of feeling, continued to shift until well into the nineteenth century. The experience of both men and women changed profoundly in the second half of the eighteenth century, in public as well as in semipublic and domestic spaces. And throughout this period, music-making and listening were part of this experience.

The eighteenth-century salon, as it emerged in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, provided a space for gatherings of members of the aristocracy with the bourgeois classes, as well as of intellectuals and music lovers. Furthermore, although the academies founded in the period were male institutions, many salons were organized under female patronage.107 The class status of musicians within the German-speaking estate society varied a great deal, however. Leopold Mozart, for example, counted himself among bourgeois educated people, such as professors, lawyers, civil servants, and professionals in the service of princes, the church, or local authorities. In this hierarchy, whereas itinerant musicians, private tutors, or military musicians were not desirable company, cantors and court conductors were.¹⁰⁸ For centuries, musicians had been servants in court service or church service, and the roots of self-confident bourgeois music-playing were in the musical societies. These institutions stood for the Verbürgerlichung of music, which also entailed the dissemination of music-making into medium and small towns and the emergence of more amateur musicians, processes that are not least manifest in the production of music-playing women automata in rural Switzerland and Rhineland.¹⁰⁹ Such processes changed the economic position of the musician in society, in a way comparable to the position shifts of literary writers, booksellers, and editors at the time. When musical societies were founded, it was assumed that music was for all estates. The difference (or similarity) in status between men and women, however, remained a contested issue.¹¹⁰ At the core of the problem of musicians, sentiments, class, and gender was also an issue of agency: in the mid-eighteenth century a fundamental change was under way, from mimetic aesthetics to expressive aesthetics. In other words, music was no longer expected to express something; instead, the musician was to express herself or himself in music.111

The Ambiguity of the Music-Machine Boundary

The scenarios replicated mechanically by the two women automata bring into focus the problem of self-expression and its reliable communication and reproduction. The textbooks by Quantz and C. P. E. Bach demonstrate that there are in fact two sites of ambiguity for the music-machine boundary in the present case: in the pedagogical literature and in automata. Bach’s and Quantz’s elaborations blur the boundary between human and mechanical music-making bodies, as do the two music-playing women automata themselves, in a manner likely intended by their makers (and likely desired by their audiences), a manner characteristic for the eighteenth-century automaton as a spectacle.

Producing an accomplished, marriageable woman was one purpose of the cultural technique of music-playing and of making other people “feel.” Creating a bourgeois musical culture and, in fact, a bourgeois society, was another. The dissemination of the scenario of the music-playing woman, the organized way in which it was accomplished, and the promise of moral, social, and sexual improvement attached to it point to a peculiar coincidence in the eighteenth century: the coming together of preindustrial, artisan production of technological artifacts with immense cultural dissemination of individuality, or mass-produced subjectivity. It is a great irony, and an interesting contradiction, that, in my findings, it is the technologies that are unique, individual, and artisan-produced; and it is the cultivated and sentimental human selves that are being mass-produced in large numbers. This circumstance preceded, and is distinct from, historical relationships that are more familiar to us, namely the relationships between the industrial revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emergence of mass culture, and the supposed disappearance of the eighteenth-century preindustrial, unique, individual subject.

The questions and paradoxes emerging from the characteristically modern phenomenon of mass-producing subjects, and our inability to distinguish these subjects from machines, manifest in my study as a blurring of the boundary between humans and distinctly preindustrial machines. Only much later, after the First and the Second World War, did the blurring of the human-machine boundary in the industrial age and industrial warfare emerge as an explanation for the failures of the promises of the entire modern world.112 In the context of the eighteenth century, however, the confusion of humans and machines, on one hand, and the mass production of this ambiguity, on the other, were instruments that helped develop the promises of mass-producing selfhood in the first place. The poets’ texts discussed in chapter 5 explore the shifts and changes that occurred from the eighteenth into the early nineteenth century, when encounters between music-playing android automata and their human counterparts were no longer productive or funny but rather became fatal.